Best abuse of the user:
Edward Rosten
Oxford University
34 The Chilterns
Gloucester Green
Oxford
OX1 2DF
United Kingdom
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat1148
Judges' Comments:
To build:
make rosten
Try:
./rosten 1.03
./rosten 1.00
For some abuse, try:
./rosten 0.99
Friction can be your friend if it does not rub you (or your mouse
cursor) in the wrong way. :-)
Selected Author's Comments:
NAME
rosten - make the mouse act as if it has been greased
SYNOPSIS
rosten [greasiness]
DESCRIPTION
This program is designed primarily to make your X windows interface more
obfuscated. Try doing something mouse driven (such as using a mouse
driven editor on this program) whilst it is running. If you're not sure
what it does, looking at the code should give a fair idea.
It also has a [cat] man page if you want to install it as a `utility'.
OPTIONS
It only takes one optional option: the greasiness factor. This is the
number that the speed is divided by on each iteration. The default is
1.03. A setting of 1 (no friction is fun), as is 0.99.
Being an X program, it recognised the DISPLAY variable.
PORTABILITY
The program is very portable, even to non X architectures. All that is
required is a large desk and some good grease.
COMMENTS
It is really rather surprising that code like this should not only be
portable, but compile with almost no warnings on most of the compilers
tested. It's a kind of shame that none of the compilers do anything
like this:
$make greasymouse
cc greasymouse.c -o greasymouse -lX11
greasymouse.c:30: This macro should have more text and spaces in it
greasymouse.c:32: This is a really stupid way to perform this operation
greasymouse.c:42: This program would look better with a newline here
greasymouse.c:48: That's a really silly thing to do
greasymouse.c:55: So is that
...
greasymouse.c:58: This program is rubbish. I'm not going to link it.
The code is best viewed with tabstops every 8 spaces.
BUGS
The mouse gets stuck completely if you give it an option of less
than 1 and leave it for too long. This is quite annoying if it
didn't leave the terminal if was run from in focus.
It gets very jerky if the processor is being used. There are
better time functions than clock() but I haven't used them.
It deflects slightly when it gets very slow.
It annoys other people if you run it on their display too
often. Maybe I should make future versions print funny jokes to
keep the humor fresh.
It's pretty ropey over a 56K modem.
It's even ropier over a 56K modem and tunneled through 3 ssh links.
WARNINGS
Pages and pages and pages of things, with GCC at any rate.
It suggests loads of ()'s where they're not needed.
It reckons I have not used some of the values I have computed. I
would never do a thing like that: I just haven't used them in
the way it's used to.
The MIPS compiler suggests an == instead of an = in expressions
such as:
&&(a=b)
but I its suggestions would break my program. It also reckons
that r() has no prototype.
Giving the -pedantic option to the MIPS compiler causes it to generate
warnings about its own header files, but not any extra ones with this
program.
With all warnings enabled, the DEC compiler, oddly enough finds some
problems with its own include files, but none with my program.
ERRORS
The DEC compiler of this version:
DEC C V5.6-079 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (Rev. 878)
can't compile the code. It thinks that preprocessor lines can not have
whitespace preceding the #. Moving the preprocessor directives to the
beginning of the line wrecks the layout but makes it compile.